James Burke: Heartwood

"You know, that actually crossed my mind," I said.

His eyes rested calmly on my face. "We both know why you don't like Earl," he said. "But Peggy Jean asked you out there for that lunch, didn't she? How many women ask their old boyfriends to their husbands' business lunches? That doesn't strike you as peculiar?"

"Not with Peggy Jean. She's a decent and fine person."

Marvin got up from his chair and pulled open the window. He leaned on the sill and looked out at the oaks on the courthouse lawn and the mockingbirds flying in and out of the shade. "I'm coaching American Legion this year," he said. "For some reason I can't teach those boys not to swing on a change-up. Meanest pitch in baseball. The pitcher holds the ball in the back of his hand and messes up your head every time."

For lunch I walked over to the saloon and pool room next to the barbershop and ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee at the bar. The saloon was dark and had wood floors and an old mirror over the bar and was cooled by electric fans mounted on the walls.

Skyler Doolittle walked in from the glare of the street and stood at the end of the bar, twisting his torso one way, then another, his fused neck turning with his shoulders, until he saw me in back.

"This fellow Deitrich is trying to have me sent to the asylum. I want to hire you. Ain't nobody else around here gonna represent me. I want my watch back, too," he said.

"Why would Earl want to send you to an asylum, Mr. Doolittle?" I asked.

"The fellow's a cheat. I confronted him with it. In the Langtry Hotel dining room. In front of all them businessmen."

"I'm primarily a criminal defense lawyer. I don't know if I'm the right man for you, sir."

His eyes looked about the saloon, wide, frenetic. The pool players were bent over the tables in cones of light.

"I knowed your daddy years back. You was river-baptized," he said. "Immersed both in the reflection of the sky and the silt from Noie's flood. That means the earth and the heavens got you cupped between them, just like the hands of God. I ain't no crazy person, Mr. Holland. On a clear day like today I see everything the way it is. I'm haunted by them children. A crazy man don't walk around in Hell."

"The children in the bus accident?" I said.

"They talk to me out of the flames, sir. I don't never get rid of it."

The pool shooters nearby did not look in our direction, but their bodies seemed to hang motionlessly on the edges of the light that enveloped the tables.

"Why don't we walk on over to my office, Mr. Doolittle?" I said.

He fitted his Panama hat back on his head and stepped out the front door into the heat like a man braving a furnace.

I worked late in the office that evening. My air conditioner had broken and I opened the window and looked down onto the square at the cooling streets, the scrolled pink and purple and green neon on the Rialto Theater, the swallows dipping and gliding around the clock tower on the courthouse. Then I saw the sheriffs tow truck hauling Cholo Ramirez's customized 1949 Mercury through the square toward the pound.

The tow truck was followed by two cruisers that stopped on the side of the courthouse. Four uniformed deputies got out and escorted Esmeralda Ramirez, her wrists cuffed behind her, into the squat, one-story sandstone building that served as the office of Hugo Roberts.

I went back to my desk and tried to resume work. But I could not get out of my mind the image of four men dressed in khaki, their campaign hats slanted forward on their heads, the lead-gray stripes on their trousers creasing at the knees, marching a manacled girl into a building that looked like a blockhouse.

It started to sprinkle while the sun was still shining. I put on my coat and Stetson and walked across the street, then around the side of the courthouse lawn to the entrance of Hugo's office. Two of the deputies were smoking cigarettes by the door, their faces opaque, my own reflection looking back at me in their sunglasses. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Temple Carrol carry a sack of groceries from the Mexican store on the side street to her Cherokee.

"What's the deal on the girl?" I said to the deputies.

"What's it to you?" one said.

"The '49 Mercury you were towing, a kid named Cholo was driving it the other night. He tried to give me some trouble," I said.

"We got a 911. The girl was weaving on the highway out by the Deitrich place. We found a vial with two rocks in it under the seat," the same deputy said.

"Is Hugo inside?" I asked.

"Yeah, but the office is closed."

"I'll just take a minute," I said, and went between them and pushed open the heavy oak door.

Hugo Roberts was sitting behind his desk, bent forward, his elbow propped on his blotter, toking on his cigarette while he watched a deputy shake down Esmeralda Ramirez against the wall.

Her palms were high up on the logs, her ankles spread, her midriff exposed above her jeans. Her dark hair hung down on both sides of her face. A uniformed deputy ran his hands down her armpits and ribs, bis fingers brushing the edges of her breasts, then over her buttocks, up her thighs, until one hand came to rest firmly against her genitalia.

"You better get a female deputy in here, you sonofabitch," I said to Hugo.

"And you'd better get your ass out of here," he replied.

"Fuck you," I said.

" What? What did you say to him?" the deputy shaking down the girl said, straightening up now, his right hand clenching and unclenching. When I didn't answer, he shoved me in the breastbone with three fingers. "Boy, I'm about to turn you into a serious Christian."

Hugo's head was wreathed in cigarette smoke. "Kyle won't abide interference with an officer in the performance of his duty. I won't, either, Billy Bob," he said.

The deputy named Kyle snipped the cuffs on Esmeralda Ramirez's wrists again, this time in the front, and stuck his hand inside the back of her blue jeans and panties, knotting the fabric, his knuckles wedging into her buttocks, and pulled her toward a chair.

I grabbed his upper arm and spun him toward me.

The skin of his face tightened against the bone, his teeth showing, his eyes glinting. He pulled a lead-weighted blackjack from his back pocket and wrapped his palm around the braided grip. I swung with my right and caught him just below the eye, snapping his head back, driving him into the wall.

Then I felt the old curse have its way, like kerosene evaporating on hot coals and igniting in an enclosed space, a yellow-red flash that burned away all restraint and always left me numb and shaking and unable to remember what I had just done.

I felt my fist sink to my wrist in his stomach, then my boot arched into his face, the heel raking his mouth and nose, splitting the back of his head against a log in the wall.

But three other men were swinging at me now, with fists or batons or both, the blows showering across my back, and I knew I was about to slide into the bottom of a dark well where I would be safe from the angry faces that shouted down at me from above.

Then suddenly the room was still, speckled with blowing rain, the only sound that of the deputy named Kyle, on his hands and knees, spitting blood on the oak floor. Temple Carrol stood in the doorway, her extended arms and rounded shoulders and chestnut hair etched with the sun's last fiery glow.

"Ah, the testosterone boys in uniform at work and play. Hugo, you sorry sack of shit, please give me an excuse to blow your other lung out," she said.

At the same time that I, an officer of the court, was brawling with rednecks, a small man with thick glasses named Max Greenbaum was leaving a synagogue in the old Montrose district of South Houston. The rabbi, who had known Greenbaum for years, waved goodbye from the doorway. Greenbaum stopped at a post office and picked up a priority envelope, then drove into Herman Park and stopped by a tree-shaded lake and was writing on a legal pad when three cars filled with Mexican gangbangers pulled into the parking area, sealing off Max Greenbaum's Jeep.